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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22943977">red to port, green to starboard, white to guide the way</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak'>cicak</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>the agneid [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Trek: Picard</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Cunnilingus, F/M, I still love Agnes Jurati more than anyone else, Kinda, Rios is a gentleman, Self-Esteem Issues, Spies, get it Agnes, imposter syndrome, more it's LBH compliant, post season 1x06, references The Last Best Hope, stardust city rag spoilers, the impossible box spoilers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 10:03:02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,033</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22943977</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not self loathing if you're actually the worst.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Agnes Jurati/Cristóbal Rios</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>the agneid [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2233155</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>102</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>red to port, green to starboard, white to guide the way</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It's easier, once it's done. </p><p> </p><p>Agnes is reminded of an old movie her dad liked. He liked spies as much as philosophy. Agnes used to always buy mouldering paperbacks or shiny, obsolete disks of Le Carre and Fleming and Carver whenever she saw them in junk shops for him, even if the smell of ancient books often permeated through all her things, made her smell mouldering and worthless herself.</p><p>There’s a scene she’s thinking of, where a spy, a good spy, a trained spy, someone who knew what he was doing, was being taunted by the baddie. The bad guy asks how many people he’s killed. Killing someone, the first time, is hard, he says. The hero shoots him through the head. The second time is much easier, the hero taunts back to the dead body.</p><p>Agnes never planned on murdering anyone, but she has blood on her hands all the same, two colours, red and green. If she had one hand stained with each you could see which way she was facing, like the wing lights on transports. It;s all metaphorical though; she just feels stained. Each way she turns it she’s a murderer, and each way she’s lost.</p><p>Shooting the Romulan assassin in self defense was easy. The button was right there beneath her finger, and she had some phaser training before she quit the academy. Her head was full and so instinct took over, and she saved a life. An easy decision, a virtuous murder. </p><p>Watching Bruce, that giant of a man, a man who could be like a god, who created life, someone she'd admired and worshipped and collaborated with, kissed and comforted and fucked and dreamed would be the father of her positronic children...watching him die at her negligent hand, that was hard.</p><p>There are machines at Starfleet medical that could probably do something for him even now. A minimally equipped sickbay could have put him in medical stasis. A regional medical centre would have had access to artificial resus, essentially an android body to take control and keep his mind within fixable parameters (synths in all but name, but curiously were the exception to the ban). </p><p>Even with good old fashioned manual CPR, his brain probably was salvageable for 20 minutes after she stopped his heart.</p><p> </p><p>She sat there for thirty, just to be sure.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Everyone is so self absorbed on this ship, even though Agnes feels her blood-lights flashing her anxiety for all to see, it somehow just blends into the background emotional chaos of the ship. Raffi would have guessed, but the smell coming from under the door stinks of the sweet choke of snakeleaf vapour. When she appears, at Rios or Picard’s behest, she looks a shadow of herself. Skinnier, somehow, even though it's been less than a day since she came back on board. </p><p>The crew are all nice to Agnes. Bruce was important to her, and he gave them a lead before his tragic death. Even Picard doesn’t seem that bothered, really, that Bruce was dead, as if with a last confession, Bruce had served his purpose. </p><p>It’s a gift, but she wants to scream, she wants to tell them everything she knows. Keeping the secret that she’s saved the galaxy from a fate worse than they could ever imagine makes her bold. She sees Picard’s wounds and presses, gently enough to open up some cracks. He doesn’t even notice her doing it, so consumed within the narrative of his own making. If she makes it hurt, kicks out his knees, it makes her job easier.</p><p>They didn’t order her to go onto the cube, but she’s bold now. It’s like the adrenaline has rebooted her, and she’s now excited at the prospect of seeing Soji, seeing real Borg drones, seeing a cube like it’s a tourist attraction and she’s here on holiday. She is surprised to get shot down, obviously she miscalculated how stubborn Picard is, how willing he was to carve another piece out of Raffi’s delicate psyche to facilitate his own emotional torture.</p><p>Still, they don’t notice. No one notices. </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Ships night, and there's the thud outside her wall. She’s not sleeping. The chronometer ticks on, but she’s wired, like she’s been mainlining raktajino. Her eyes won’t focus enough to read, her brain won’t shut down enough to think, and there’s nowhere on this ship to go to primal scream her way into unconsciousness.</p><p>She gets up and stands in the doorway watching Rios weave the ball in a pattern that seems well worn, a sequence well trod, a trick that he learned a long time ago that has lost its power to amuse anyone but himself. </p><p>He misjudges his kick and the ball rolls towards her, and she steps out of the shadows and goes to him. She doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t bother to pretend, after a day of being defensive and suspicious and no one noticing she’s let her guard down, and she’s fascinated then that he sees something, something in the way she moves maybe, or the way she holds herself. There’s a moment where he sees something in her that no one has noticed all day. That something is different. </p><p>Somehow, where earlier she wanted someone to see her, recognise her, to put her out of her misery, she has a flash of protectiveness over the New Agnes, Agnes the murderer, Agnes the spy, Agnes the operative, Agnes the saviour of the galaxy.</p><p>Distracting him is depressingly easy.</p><p>It was always going to happen. He’s lonely, surrounded with his own face, everyone else a trigger of unwanted memories. A bruised psyche if she ever saw one (not that she’s a psychiatrist). </p><p>There’s a moment where she feels sick; thinks back to when she was younger and so consumed with self-loathing, so in need of someone to validate her terrible feelings, to take this perfect life she’d built and make it right, make it worthy of her awfulness. Someone like her didn’t deserve that life, that dream job, the respect of her peers, the beautiful Japanese countryside that greeted her each morning. The voice in her head that told her then that seducing her supervisor was the right kind of wrong, the best way to snap herself back into reality. He’d reject her, she’d fail her doctorate out of shame, she’d take a deep space mission in a nameless sickbay doing work she’d hate, and all would all be right again. </p><p>Agnes has always been able to make herself believe contradictory things. She was the best, but also the worst. She hated herself for liking herself as much as she did. She knew the right path to walk, and purposefully walked down the wrong one.</p><p>With Rios, she would like to pretend she is Mata Hari, the rising sun, spy of legend, and she is seducing the Captain to stop him from learning her secret, deep in ship’s night, her last major fuckup cooling in a poorly calibrated freezer module that should, if she’s right, cause enough cellular damage to hide what she did even from Starfleet Medical.</p><p>Instead, it’s not that. She’s tired and there’s adrenaline burning through her blood, he’s hot and scarred and his chest makes her heart skip a beat, and with just a small step in the right direction they're kissing out there in the open, his warm, broad chest under her fingertips within minutes of introducing a simple innuendo into the conversation. It’d be depressing if it wasn’t thrilling, if it wasn’t that sick validation of the monster that lives in her head. </p><p> </p><p>She leads him to the captain's quarters. He has a broad, wooden bed, hospital corners on the comfortable sheets, perfect right angles for each of the plush pillows, comfort blurring his military edges. He holds her hand gently, just a brush of fingers, doesn’t push anything. It’s dreamlike, slow, as he bears her down onto the comforter, kisses her for long minutes. He’s warm and sturdy and smells good, warm and masculine and healthy. He raises himself on one elbow and grins at her, before helping her to take off her sleep tank, shaking his head and smiling as he kisses her breasts like a starving man at an Ambassador’s banquet. He takes his time, makes pleased noises when she runs her fingers (her stained murderer’s fingers) through his hair. She can feel him taking mental notes as to what she responds to as he kisses and his way down her belly and thighs with his generous mouth, his generosity and chivalry so abundant she feels drenched in it, covered in it, his simple pleasure suffocating in its sweetness.</p><p>His beard is soft and oiled so even on the sensitive skin of her thighs there’s just a prickly pressure rather than a scratch, which she finds mildly disappointing. She wants to be marked, to be raw, not to be treasured and caressed. She thinks about pulling away, taking control, but then he hums against her, gets his hands under her butt and pulls her gently into place for him to feast on her. She's so wet, so ravenously aroused, all that adrenaline she's been a battery for finally finding somewhere to go and so she doesn’t fight against it, doesn’t listen to the self-destructive voice in her head and lets him do his best. </p><p>She has always orgasmed easily, a gift to mediocre men, but Rios is anything but mediocre. He takes his time, takes it slow, doesn’t try to rush her orgasm. Perhaps he senses that she’s close and works to make it last, but he’s a marvel all the same. She writhes against his mouth when he suckles her clit for long, long pulses that makes her yearn to get something, anything, inside her, he groans when she pulls his hair, chuckles when she begins to beg. Finally, he slides a couple of thick fingers into her, and she practically bucks the ship out of its warp envelope she comes so hard.</p><p>In the aftermath, aftershocks still zapping through her, she pulls herself together and goes to reciprocation. One orgasm won’t be enough for the amount of adrenaline she needs to burn off, however good, however weak kneed she feels now, there’s no time. She rushes up onto her knees and kisses his soaking mouth, pulls him back up to the head of the bed, strips him, pushes his utilitarian trousers down to expose his cock, thick enough that she can only just get her hand round it comfortably, satisfyingly. She puts him where she wants him, and grips the headboard above his head and holds his gaze as she sinks down onto his cock. God, she loves this. It's exactly what she wants, him patient and vibrating with desire underneath her, strong thighs and sure hands. Her thighs just rest on the mattress when he's fully seated inside her, and it feels delicious, exactly what she wants, thick and hard enough to clench around to keep her balance, but he has his hands on her hips as well, his beautiful face under hers, panting, looking slightly gormless as she rides him, braces against the headboard and really goes for it.</p><p>His face crumples when he comes, he looks hurt, like it's hurting him to come so hard. His hands squeeze her and hold her in place and it's triumph she feels, as she touches her clit hard and comes around him, head thrown back to look towards the stars.</p><p>She rises up and drops off him into the deep bedding, sore and wet and exhausted. ‘I shouldn’t’, she thinks, as Rios snuggles in behind her. ‘He’s touched starved’ she rationalises, and doesn’t move or push him away. She’ll get up in a moment, go back to her quarters. Draw a line. </p><p>“Score?” Rios asks, kissing her shoulder, his smile wide against her skin. “A review, hm? Would you recommend sleeping with a captain to friends and family?”</p><p>“More than I deserve”, she thinks, and goes to say the opposite, but it comes out as just a huff of warm air as she slides, against her better judgement, into deep, dreamless sleep.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I love this show so much. My fic last week didn't get jossed, and even though I have a lot of other stuff to work on, I still had to sit down and bash out all my feelings this week. </p><p>Come and talk to me over at <a href="http://cicaklah.tumblr.com">my tumblr</a> about star trek because I have so many feels, I cannot hold them.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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